Attrition
The trailer suddenly spun in place like a top.
As it whirled, it swatted away the surrounding survivors one after another.
In the meantime, Won-goo, tossed about inside the amusement-park ride of a rotating trailer, pulled out a medical kit and treated his wounds.
The internal organ damage could be handled with the power of the booster. The critical issue was the long gash across his abdomen. If he didn't deal with it fast, his organs could spill right out.
That bald bastard... carved me up nice and filthy, didn't he.
Thanks to him, the custom-made armor Won-goo had paid a fortune for had to be written off as spent.
The armor survivors wore was nothing like the plate of the Middle Ages. Weapons could still be crude, primal things, but armor was a fusion of technologies drawn from many civilizations—modern engineering layered over woven enchantments. Which meant that once it broke, repair was a nightmare. That went double for the lightweight, high-defense kind Won-goo favored.
So he stripped it off without hesitation.
The windbreaker. The vest beneath it. Even the thick shirt under that. Every layer had deep lacerations torn through it.
Clack! Clack! Clack! Clack!
Even as blood seeped steadily out of him, he didn't bother with disinfectant. He didn't so much as wipe the blood away. He simply stapled the wounds shut with a surgical stapler, then pulled a spare set of armor from the box under his cot.
Most people disposed of damaged armor and had new pieces fitted, but Won-goo always kept a backup on hand. Living as a survivor meant never knowing when exactly this kind of danger would come knocking.
Armor on, he injected a cocktail of drugs, then steadied his mind with an inhaler. The whole process ran like water—swift, smooth, practiced.
Even so, the crew outside was having a rough time of it.
Protico's sphere was growing, yes—but slowly. The reason was simple: there wasn't much life around here to consume. Protico was a sphere that ballooned at terrifying speed by devouring every living thing in its path. In the Dwarf Elf Forest, countless small lives carpeted the ground—even twigs and insects could feed it.
But this place was bare concrete. This had apparently been an airfield once; an enormous expanse of empty pavement stretched out in every direction, and that put a hard limit on how quickly Protico could grow. The only thing it could feed on and grow from out here was the survivors themselves.
And the Ganjeol Point survivors who had gathered here were, baseline, a cut above the dwarf elves. The elves were naturally far superior to ordinary humans in raw physical ability—but that didn't make them stronger than coin-enhanced survivors.
"Nowhere safe around here, huh."
Won-goo was the head, but he fought in the field more than he commanded from the rear. With his range of abilities besides, he was effectively the core of Won-goo's Services in any fight. With him knocked out of the battle by injury, it was only natural that everyone was struggling.
The one mercy was that Mu Beob-sa, who had been holding the shield, had started fighting in earnest the moment Won-goo went down.
Even for Mu Beob-sa, however, Ganjeol's current numbers were an overwhelming burden. It wasn't just raw headcount—the executives who'd been pinned down had broken free, and scattered among the enemy were individuals with strange and dangerous abilities. Nothing was more foolish than fighting an enemy you didn't understand. Won-goo's Services were now crossing a swaying rope bridge in thick fog, blind on every side.
Won-goo fired off an emergency transmission to his crew. It was an expensive spell—the kind of function he rarely bothered to use—but right now he had no choice.
⟦ Raphael has activated her ability. Hold on a little longer, everyone. I'm coming back out. ⟧
A short order. Only then did Raphael sense that something had happened, and she broke off to fall back toward the trailer. Protico was slow, but it kept swelling, inch by inch.
As Raphael rotated back to the crew's side, Won-goo looked out the window at Pacific.
Strength was returning to his slack body.
He should be hitting his limit about now.
The efficacy of the patch Won-goo had given him was outstanding. On top of that, Pacific's Gift amplified the power of any medicine, which was the only reason he could still move at all despite the vicious curse on him.
But that, too, was about to run dry.
Won-goo deliberately steered the trailer toward where Pacific was rampaging. It took him farther from the crew, but he didn't care. Pacific, the worn-down veteran, understood the intention the instant the spinning trailer began to advance. He jumped, hauling himself up onto its roof.
Won-goo flipped open the window mounted on the trailer's side and smacked the ceiling above it. Come in through here.
Pacific slid through the open window and dropped inside from the ceiling—and winced as he landed. In those few seconds of exposure, an arrow and an axe had found their mark on his body.
"Shouldn't you be using fire or something?"
"Can't. They came prepared for it."
"Fire's exactly what this situation calls for."
"You're near your limit, aren't you?"
"Your hands are shaking, so yeah. Obviously."
"Well, you gotta go back out and fight."
"Can't fight anymore."
"I'll give you something stronger."
"There's something stronger than that?"
"There is. But the side effects are worse too."
"What are they? Just hand it over already."
Won-goo passed him the pill he'd already laid out, and Pacific snatched it and swallowed it on the spot.
"So what are the side effects?"
"You can't eat."
"What?"
"In your current state, your stomach will melt."
"Fuck—that's hitting me now—AAAAAGH!"
They'd said his stomach would melt, but he felt it burning down his esophagus first. And it wasn't just a burning sensation—it was like slapping industrial-grade popping candy onto freshly flayed skin. This was pain fierce enough to make Pacific—pumped so full of boosters that ordinary agony didn't register—scream at the top of his lungs.
"Get out there! Now!"
"FUCK! AAAAAGH!"
Screaming all the while, Pacific moved anyway. The pain was beyond description.
Clang!
This time it was the trailer's rear door that swung open. Pacific poured out of it and went straight to bailing out the crew in trouble—chakram in one hand, dagger in the other.
Then Gong Won-goo stepped out himself.
The moment Pacific, who'd been holding the trailer's front alone, vanished, the Ganjeol Point survivors swarmed the vehicle and began hammering on the windows.
Won-goo's trailer had been engineered so that glass wouldn't shatter from anything that tame. But it wasn't invincible. Durability existed, and once that durability ran dry, the trailer's functions would shut down entirely—reverting it to a perfectly ordinary trailer. And a shutdown didn't just mean the loss of its systems. The subspace inside would vanish with it, and the cargo stored there could be lost as well. On top of that, the shelter function would go dark—the Temporary Shelter and the trailer were designed as an inseparable pair.
It wasn't for nothing that Won-goo always said the trailer is everything. It wasn't for nothing that he'd been peeling off dedicated personnel to guard it while the rest of the crew went out hunting nothing but low-grade mobs. He didn't have many crew members, and their capabilities weren't anything to boast of, so playing it safe had been the sensible road.
Won-goo's rifle still hung suspended in the air.
Meanwhile, Pacific planted a foot on Suwon's head, launched himself skyward, and swept clean over the skull of Dae-young as the man came lunging in.
Shluk!
Dae-young's head split horizontally with surgical precision, painting the scene in something out of a nightmare. And through it all, Pacific kept right on screaming. To anyone who didn't know the truth, he would have looked completely out of his mind.
But Won-goo knew the truth. He'd taken something like this once himself, long ago. A pain followed you that was nearly impossible to endure—because the drug had originally been made for torture. A compound designed to keep its victim alive while delivering agony beyond measure. Simply put: the drug's effects hit harder than Pacific's curse did.
With Pacific back in the fight, Won-goo climbed onto the trailer's roof and started shaking off the Ganjeol crew that clung to it like flies.
It wasn't easy. His warhammer was a devastating weapon in anyone's hands, but it wasn't built on impressive base stats. Hammering out a one-man massacre with it in this situation had a hard ceiling. Sensing that limit, Won-goo's face contorted.
"There go my hard-earned coins! You bastards!"
In the end, Won-goo decided to spend his reserves on the trailer's specs. He already suspected he'd over-invested in the thing even at this point in the timeline—and now here he was spending more. The curses wrote themselves.
Fuming, Won-goo paid out 50 gold coins and leapt down from the trailer's roof.
ZZZZZKRAK!
The survivors clinging to the trailer, mid-assault, collapsed in place—still twitching, electrocuted. Those with insufficient resistance charred black on the spot. For a 50-coin feature it seemed almost insultingly simple, but the raw power was tremendous. Better yet, it wasn't single-use—it was rechargeable. That was the real selling point.
The problem was that Won-goo had never planned to upgrade the trailer this way. Now that lethal current coursed across its hull, the trailer itself had become a weapon. Won-goo put on acceleration and started ramming survivors with it. Before, a ram was just a ram. Now it was an instrument of mass slaughter—because the electricity flowing off the trailer was the same exotic, insulation-defying stuff Ganjeol wielded. Over-technology, indistinguishable from magic.
Beep! Beep! Beep!
The only catch was that maintaining that current kept bleeding coins out of him, second by second. The Gift that could do anything—Blessing of Machine Civilization. A cursed Gift that demanded an astronomical price for every use.
The saving grace was that by the time Won-goo had burned through another 15 coins or so, Protico had finally grown large enough. And its speed had climbed too. From here on, there was nothing left to hold back. A two-meter sphere of churning flesh dragging shrieking enemies into itself and kneading them into its mass—few men could hold their sanity watching it. The horrific sounds it produced. The limbs and torsos fused together in whatever arrangement chance decreed. Even Won-goo's own crew had grimaced at the sight of it the first time. The shock the Ganjeol crew took was beyond imagining.
"You—what the hell are you people—what the actual—"
Curses flew from every mouth, but among the fighters assembled here, nothing existed that could stand against the bloated Protico now. And even if something did, no one had the stomach left to test it. Their own comrades, who had fought so bravely moments before, were scattering to the winds in every direction.
Mix belatedly registered the rout and turned to run, but it was too late.
Fwoosh!
A harpoon slammed into her back. It was Jeon Hye-ji's shot—the woman's red blood streaming down from her hairline as she fired.
Thwack!
"Ugh!"
A short groan escaped Mix as she fought against the harpoon line. She had real strength in her, and she put up a fierce struggle. But Hye-ji was stronger. And then there was the noose of Taildog tail coiled around her ankles besides.
Crash!
She hit the asphalt and scrambled desperately to crawl away, but there was no breaking the drag.
Won-goo shuffled over to her, took the document Jo Mu-sa produced, and held it up against Mix's face. A black-and-white printout, but the face was easy to identify.
"That's her. Ganjeol's daughter. Haah..."
Letting out a long sigh, Won-goo pulled out a cigarette, and Lee Hyun-sung hurried over to light it for him.
The crew was in sorry shape. They'd been through plenty of hell together over the months, but this was the first time they'd come apart this badly. That was how dangerous today's ambush had been—dangerous enough to burn through a serious chunk of the coins Won-goo had been squirreling away.
"Same bloodline, same tricks, I suppose. These seeds need to be pulled out at the root. That's the only way this shit doesn't repeat itself."
Then another noose closed around Mix's neck. Lee Hyun-sung lifted it, and the line cinched tight against her throat.
Won-goo stared straight into her eyes with a look like he wanted to bite her face off.
"Hey. No time, so I'll keep this short. The Seal Collectors. Where'd you meet those bastards?"
Mix felt a deep, gnawing terror. A terror deeper than Won-goo's eyes themselves.
The trailer was tearing down the road at full speed.
But something was different from usual: riding ahead of it was an enormous sphere—Protico. It had grown even since earlier, now pushing past three meters in diameter. Like some deranged dung beetle, the trailer rolled Protico along before it as it barreled forward.
The target: the Seal Collectors.
They'd fled the battlefield long ago, but against a trailer burning coins for every ounce of speed, the distance would close fast.
The moment the collectors came into view, Won-goo stuck his head out of the driver's window and roared.
"You sons of bitches! You trash the place and now you're running?!"